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TiVo switches off UK sales
SmackCrackAndPot writes "On the TiVo Community forum, there is an announcement that TiVo will be switching off UK sales.
This was previously reported in November at
BizTech Library.
It's probably not too surprising, after the BBC
spammed TiVo owners with a new comedy show."
i find it funny *pun intended* that it took british comedy, of which i am a big fan, to remove tivo, when seemingly no amount of litigation and pointless court hearings can do it anywhere else.
at least thats my take on things.
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
What's the reason for pulling the plug in the UK? Just not economically feasible?
This doesn't look good for the future of a Canadian version of the TiVo.
What a bunch of crap. TiVo units have a certain amount of memory set aside for "enhanced content" (that means infomercials). If you don't look in the menus, you'd never know it was there, unless you happened to be watching at 4AM when it was captured. In NO way can TiVo be said to be spamming. Someone bought a paid placement. Hey, I hated it when TiVo recorded a bunch of crappy Eminem interviews, but I just didn't watch it, and I certainly didn't whine about it.
Remember TiVo makes ZERO dollars from hardware sales, they are solely supported by subscription revenues, ad placements, and selling marketing data.
Read the reply comments on that forum. Now read the same hoax going back over the last few months.
Now HAND.
For crying out loud, those people are just looking for something to complain about (which I'm sure you /. folks will understand ;-)). It's not like the show is filled with porn, it looks like the show is like any other brain-dead sitcom. I can just imagine the 10 year old boys waking early on Saturday morning and finding this illicit show on their Tivo. As they watched the tittilating comedy with jokes about urinal cakes, their eyebrows twitched nervously, and they repeatedly looked over their shoulder to see if Mom or Dad were walking in.
Jeesh.
--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
The article uses the term "post-watershed" which apparently refers to programs broadcast after 9pm in the UK.
This is a page with relevant legal regulations that are implicated...
Hope that clears up any confusion.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
In the UK, there is a huge push from sky to sell its Sky + service, which is the main competetion for Tivo here. Haven't actually tried the Tivo, but Sky + is an extremely competent package.
How's TIVO a threat to BBC anyway since there are no commercials to filter out?
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID= 13703
Thompson, Tivo's manufacturer is the one that pulled out - Tivo is still looking for new manufacturers.
.. also known as the loss leader, seems to be a defining practice in interactive home entertainment these days. That basically means that the company makes no money off the initial sale, but reaps high margins from subsequent purchases necessary to keep that initial device functional.
.. but that's another issue.
.. then trying to make profits by selling mandatory advertising spots to media companies. Unfortunately, there aren't enough TiVo users to convince media companies to pay big bucks for the spots.
It worked extremely well for Sony -- selling the playstation at zero (sometimes negative) margins, then making money by being the sole licenser of games (that they didn't spend money developing) for the platform.
I think the xbox is taking financially because Microsoft went out and bought a substantial number of good game development companies who haven't been able to release a seriously block-busting game
TiVo is a completely different story. They're selling the consoles at or below cost
The population of TiVo users has to grow -- and that means they need to lower the cost of their consoles. Dramatically. Even if it means reducing the functionality of the box. When TiVo costs $50, and you can buy it at Wallgreens, that's when advertising and media companies are going to sit up and thing "Holy crap, that's a huge captive audience."
I'll take that bet. The government (even our corrupt American one) is hardly silly enough to intentionally put themselves sqaurely opposed to millions of individuals exercising their freedom to code and share software. That's alienating a very big demographic, (think of all the corporations going OSS to save money-- mine, for example, and we're a real estate firm). Furthermore, it's alienating a very pissed-off demographic with a lot of resources that will put up a big fight.
Most OSS/freedom issues are minor ones that involve particular lawsuits invoking everyone's favorite target, the DMCA, or silly proposed bills to mandate DRM or some such. Imagine, however, that the US Gov't decided to promote Windows usage by changing policy to only award contracts to organizations using M$ software (the only way, really, for them to push such a switch). Can you imagine the outrage from HP and IBM over such a policy? One of those open-source shops would file a project proposal on the spot, and then go immediately straight to the courts to challenge the rejection. And there's no possible way the government would be able to defend such a blanket policy. (There are rules which lay out the criteria on which the federal government can award contracts, etc.)
And don't even get me started on how absurd the suggestion is to use M$ Desktop Sharing for spying. The service doesn't run by default, and has to be set up by the user. And no properly configured would EVER let remote desktop traffic in or out.
So I'll take that bet. What are your terms? Let me know what the timetable is for when I can collect my money, and I'll e-mail you and we can work out the details
I live in Ireland, a country of around 4 million people compared to the U.K. (our closest neighbour and fellow island just north-west of France, in Europe, about 4000k east of New York) at about 60 million. We were lucky enough to get a half-baked Sky service in Ireland for quite a while, but they never really treated us the same. For example, Tivo's were out, no service :-( They were meant to come in along with a Sky+ box (which is made by pace and which a sky rep told me just before it was being launched had "stolen the bits they needed from Tivo". BTW a quick call to sky's freephone number (yes at 3am) confirmed Sky+ STILL isn't available here and won't be til they launch the interactive services which are coming (and have been for over a year).
Now I had been thinking for a while that an open/distributed tv listings service for Ireland would be great, but that I might find little help in putting it together! But perhaps if Tivo is closing in the U.K. there might be an existing marketplace who were paying £10/month who are looking for an alternative. I can't imagine it would be the most impossible task to fool a present tv into using the free service. You'd have to reverse engineer the format used by the service, and then (to save making people solder) you'd need to deal with the fact the Tivo has a telephone connection and dials it's own number. You could establish some phone numbers to feed the demand and use a simple router to translate all dialed numbers to the new number or you could make a server to run on a PC (with a modem) that answers the calls and feeds it the data (which the server keeps up to date). There is only one response to this (and sky's attempt to take the £10/month for themselves) and that's to take the money away from them!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
In most of Europe, the broadcasting laws allow only child-friendly programming during the day, but pretty much anything (sometimes porn) at night. I assume that's what they're referring to when they say "watershed".
Yes, it's something like. In the UK I think broadcasters restrict more mature content to after 9pm. I don't know whether they are laws, or just industry standards. It certainly helps parents a lot.
;)
I was shocked when I first moved to the US: the first time I watched TV there after arriving I saw Predator on the box at 10am Sunday morning. Being accustomed to the watershed, I didn't think it very appropriate, especially considering that is prime time for children.
The flip side to the watershed is that the content is often more mature, more risque, and less cut than what appears on US TV (which surprises most people as they expect the British to be particularly uptight and pridish.) It's nothing by continental European standards though
A geographic watershed is a region that drains to a single river/lake etc. It is bounded by a line of high ground that differentiates it from the surrounding other watershed areas.
The phrase "watershed event" is used to denote a particular point at which things become easier - i.e. "The advent of peer-to-peer filesharing was a watershed devent for the distribution of music". :-)
So it would seem that this usage of watershed is referring to a point of demarcation -- in this case a time of day.
We are separated by a common language. Sometime I should put my experience on using a Haynes automotive service manual to pull an engine. Language provided an amusing mis-step.
So I conclude, perhaps incorrectly, that is the point after which programming goes downhill.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
'watershed' is defined as 'turning point'...'post' = after, so it seems the marketing arm (ass?) of the BBC claims that program was past being new or in other words, widely accepted by viewers in the UK. "Everyone likes XYZ, let's use it!" - Imagine the meeting conversation where this decision was made. M.P's Flying Circus would have had an easy target with this one. "I'm a spammer and I'm ok...I spams all night and I spams all day.....
I send out spam,
I eat my lunch,
I go to the lavatory...
On Wednesday I go channel surfing
with a no-spam TiVo equipped TV."
TiVo programming, at least at that point in time, allowed content such as trailers, etc. to be loaded onto the boxes without being requested by the end user. These were apparently considered to be ok for marketing purposes, etc. In this case, the BBC took advantage and loaded an entire program to everyone's box, clearly unaware of the public's concept of spam.
I think marketing wonks worldwide have gone down to the same lab, where the brain circuits relating to victimless crime, along with sociopathic attributes common to all spammers, are fused into one synapse that fires automatically when such keywords/phrases as 'customer benefit'; 'unique opportunity'; 'sureness of prospect' and 'special offer' are used in any conversation.
The BBC had no clue that what they were doing was objectional. That's the issue for me...they have their hand on the switch, yet they are out of touch with the tastes, attitudes and wishes of their customers.
you get a choice. but i've found i pretty much only watch shows already recorded on the tivo (for the commerical skipping) and just let it record what ever it wants from the cable box.
now if i could just get the cat to stop chewing on the IR blaster that controls my cable box.
now with the direct tv satellite version of Tivo you can record one show and watch another, or record 2 shows (this is because it records the already compressed version of the show from satellite so it doesn't waste processor power on the encoding, saving plenty of processor for dual recording)
TiVo has the ability to record supplemental content like movie previews, behind-the-scenes footage, and "see this for more info" kind of advertising.
This content is generally accessible from a showcase section that you might browse to see what different networks are promoting, and I think they envisioned things like short broadcast ads that pop-up an on-screen TiVo icon to click for additional information. They also cycle some of this content through a listing on your main menu to promote it independently.
In the UK, the BBC purchased one of these main menu ads to record an entire episode of a new program.
Viewers in the UK were livid about 2 things. First, they felt that recording an entire program during prime time was going too far in exercising corporate control over their equipment. Secondly, they were upset that the program was adult content (post-watershed means it was rated such that it isn't suitable to air during "family hours.") that parents could not block with parental controls or delete from the main menu.
TiVo absolutely learned a lot from that incident (they had inadvertly overlooked the parental control issues) and they will approach new advertising sales opportunities very differently in the future.
Now, having said that, the real reason that they are shutting down UK sales is that the manufacturer of the TiVo box in the UK stopped making it. TiVo doesn't have the capital to invest in the UK market and have shifted to an approach of merely supporting the existing users, but nobody new. In that scenario, no need to run a sales office. Lay them off and spend the money getting new US subscribers.
Yes, it will always record your "to do" list first. I often set to record things overnight and I've never had something drop because it conflicted with a "showcase" (that's where these sit when they're not on the main menu with a little star).
In fact, it won't even change the channel on you if you happen to be watching something.
I was up the other night sleepless, flipping channels when TiVo asked if it could change the channel. I was suprised because I didn't remember setting anything up for 3:30 am on the Discovery Channel, but I let it go because I thought maybe my wife had set to record something.
So, it changed the channel (with my permission) and proceeded to start recording some previews for "Daredevil". I decided I'd rather go back to some documentary about Rhinos humping or something I was previously watching, so it let me change the channel without complaining that I was interrupting a scheduled recording or anything.
It went back and picked up the movie previews the next night, I guess because they showed up in a couple days.
I guess I was a little wary that TiVo was recording what amounts to ads at first. But I really don't mind that much now. Some of the stuff like best buy kind of turns me off, a few things like the daredevil previews I liked, and the rest I really don't even care about.
Besides, isn't there a backdoor code or something to keep TiVo from recording these?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
For goodness sake folks, you're suppposed to be techies, don't you understand that all TV programming is "spammed" in the sense that it's broadcast to everybody??? That makes it fairly silly to accuse the BBC of spamming. Yeah, the BBC and all TV stations have been spamming us for half a century, it's what they do.
All TVs, VCRs, and TiVos in the appropriate reception areas received the broadcast, if they were switched on and tuned to the right channel. I've never heard of anyone switching on the telly and shouting in horror, "I'm being spammed!". The TiVos also stored what they were receiving, as that's what they were designed to do with this special content. That really does make this a non-story.
Please reserve the word "spam" for individually addressed delivery systems delivering the same item to multiple recipients. Applying it to broadcast systems makes no sense at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Why did this thread instantly jump to the conclusion it was over this infomercial issue? Tivo never caught on like wildfire, even though people like me have bought them for their parents and siblings knowing they'd love it like I did. But for whatever reasons it did not become the VCR replacement, and Tivo's stock price has always struggled. Still, to know PVR is to love it. Tivo hasn't gone under, but for example on DirecTV it's no longer called Tivo, it's just part of your DirecTV service. The company did not flourish in one form and so it has taken on other forms. It appears that PVR's are accepted when they are part of a cable or satellite box, i.e., a built-in feature of something else. So I put very little stock in this notion that an informercial brought down Tivo in the UK, when this closure falls right in line with the direction the company has been heading in.
Support?????? Maybe in the past, but not anymore. The Tivo Series 2 boxes are locked down rather heavily. The boot ROM checks for a signed kernel, if it's not signed, it won't run. The kernel checks for modifications to the file system, if any are found it replaces the files and reboots. Although there have been some reports of hardware hacks to replace the ROM, it's not exactly what I would call "all of the support they give to the hacking community".
Not to mention the whole 3.2 backdoor code debacle. After thousands of hours of CPU time, the project had to be abandoned. The conclusion was that Tivo has either used an invalid hash or very long key sequence as the backdoor code in version 3.2, when previously the codes were short and easily hacked. It is just one more example of how hostile Tivo is becoming to hackers.
Tivo is attempting to create an image of greater security (keeping out the dirty hackers) on a software and hardware level in order to market the ability to distribute content with the Tivo as a DRM platform. If you can't hack it, you pretty much have to accept any restrictions they put on content delivered to you. They can deliver PPV events that are deleted after 1 day or not able to be recorded at all.
Fortunately, I have a Series 1 and can do whatever I like with it. I have a backup of every software revision Tivo has put out, so I can revert to an earlier version at any time. I certainly am not going to allow Tivo to send me any more updates, the boot ROM in the S1 is flashable so it's quite possible for Tivo to send down updates that lock me out of my machine.
New Tivo owners are not so lucky. There is no reverting to an earlier version of your brand-new Tivo. I have recommended Tivo to friends in the past but given the disregard for the community that has staunchly supported them (not only by buying subscriptions but by keeping extraction and guide replacement information difficult and obscure and by adding value for other users-free of charge) I don't know if I can still recommend them. I do like the UI but what really got me to buy one was the hack potential. Now that they have no hack potential, the luster is gone and I see the company for what it is: moneygrubbing fools that will alienate their most loyal users for a few quick bucks.
Enigma
... when you've purchased a ReplayTV today.
Now I understand what all the fuss is about. You really have to sit down, pause a live broadcast, rewind it a bit, then start playing again to understand why this thing is so cool.
It's a pity that this device that makes me watch more TV is under fire by the TV Industry. Am I going to skip commercials? Yes. Am I going to skip every single commercial? Can't skip commercials while the show is originally airing. I'm using it to catch shows I hadn't seen yet. If the show's good, I'm going to watch it when it airs. The ads are still getting to me, even more so now that I have more shows I want to watch.
Okay, that horse has been beaten to death. It's just sad that these industries are so short sighted. I mean, think about it, the more fun TV is (i.e. trading shows...), the more interest is generated in seeking interesting content.
Okay, I'm not really on-topic anymore. Sorry. Just wanted to vent a bit. Hopefully you can imagine my reaction to the headline the day I bought the machine.
The withdrawl of tivo from the UK is in part related to the wider mess that is UK terrestrial broadcasting, and there's a bunch of stuff going on that anyone outside the UK wouldn't be expected to know, leave now if you don't care.
There are theoretically 5 analogue terrestrial channels in the UK, and in many places only 4.
There is also no single widely available cable network either and if you do have access, it's typically a local monopoly and it's pretty expensive - typically £20-30/month for a descent package.
The Sky (satellite) service is polular but also expensive.
Several years ago a digital terrestrial service was launched and failed miserably and with much fanfare. This has recently been re-launched as entirely an entirely free-to-view service and looks set to succeed.
Now as you can see, we have a real mess of technologies here and if a company such as Tivo wants to sell a premium recorder product they've got a problem. Their marked is spread across satellite, and a multiplicity of analogue/digital terrestrial and cable formats.
What decoders do they build into their device?
1. Sky which re-transmits all of the (good) free-to-view channels have their own HD based recorder.
2. People with only terrestrial analogue are happy with VCRs
3. The cable market is fragmented technologically.
4. Digital terrestrial is a new but very small market.
So they gave up, and I don't blame them - it's a mess.
B.T.W. Pace have a digital terrestrial HD recorder which might be interesting but it was due before Christmas and there's still no sign.
Wow I'm boring.
TiVo may have seemed revolutionary in the USA, but in the UK it was just one of many enhanced TV systems.
TiVo's biggest rival, Sky Plus (Sky+) did everything that TiVo did, and more, came pre-packaged with an installation engineer's visit and had the branding and backing of the UK's largest pay-TV provider, Sky (backed by Rupert Murdoch/Fox corp).
Sky already had a shedload of TV toys. For instance, I remember one of my business meetings in Texas two years ago, the CEO of this oil firm was saying something like "In the future, you'll be able to watch a football match and zoom in on individual players".
Then I glanced down at the predicted coverage map for my GPRS phone in Texas...
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
AIUI, the TiVo box works by downloading listings via a dial-up connection, and MPEG-encoding an analogue TV signal.
The thing is, they released it in the UK after digital TV was "widely" available. IMHO, most of the people that would consider buying a TiVo are likely to be people who have digital TV.
DVB has digital, in-band listings information that can be updated in real-time if the line-up changes. Additionally, with something like Sky+ or one of the yet-to-surface digital terrestrial or cable DVR boxes, you don't have to decode the MPEG to analogue and then re-encode it to MPEG before you can record it. That makes for a cheaper box, with higher quality audio/video and better compression (so more stuff can be recorded).
I'm guessing that demand for integrated DVR systems will be much higher than it ever was for TiVo.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
All current PVR/DVR systems are quite restricted in their capability because they only have analog inputs/outputs.
It's a great shame that people like Sky and NTL (digital satellite and cable operators in the UK) don't put IEEE1394 firewire connectiors (in and out) on all their equipement, so that instead of getting a nice digital signal in MPEG 2 format - converting it to analog, then reencoding it back to MPEG 2 when it would be so easy for the box to just stream out MPEG 2 so that the original source could be recorded unaltered. I can't believe that some enterprising hacker hasn't made an add on board for DVB or digital cable that you can shove inside your box so you can stream the MPEG 2 stream to a PC for digital recording.
One day all video recorders will be firewire only, record digitally, have access to the program guide and have a built in DVD writer for making recorded shows 'portable'. The thing is, due to lack of innovation, it'll probably take 5-10 years, even though all the technology to do this exists now.
Nick...
Sky+ *is* TiVo in the UK, I'm pretty certain that this is why they're pulling the standalone Hardware sales (after all as someone else pointed out, they make no profit from the sale of licenced hardware, the profit is in the subscription service)
The Sky+ on-screen branding is different, and the hardware is integrated into your decoder box but it's exactly the same system, and (afaik) the subscription support is farmed out by Sky to TiVo.
I have a standalone TiVo branded unit hooked into my sky box (which was bought back when we had cable) and whenever we have Sky engineers out they comment that it's the same system, most are interested in how the non-integrated version compares (the answer is that it's very good but occasionally fluffs channel changes which Sky+ doesn't.)
For those of you not in the UK, Sky are the dominant multichannel TV providers (think Microsoft if it helps) with the two cable co.s trailing ever further behind in market share (last time I looked I think they collectively had about something like 20% and falling) Telewest (one of the two cable co.s) actually altered the software in many of their set-top boxes to make it incompatible with ToVo about 18months ago (which is one thing that promted me to switch) so really the only UK TiVo market is Sky customers, who are all still able to upgrade to Sky+ aka integrated-TiVo.
While it does rather worryingly smack of on impending media-monopoly in the UKs PVR sector, TiVo's announcement is most emphatically NOT a sign that they're flagging in the UK - quite the reverse: back-door TiVo sales through Sky+ are healthy and on the increase.
Maybe you're confused because TiVo was marketed in the UK by Sky, and TiVo used to have a "supported by Sky" flash on the main menu?
Erm, "everything that TiVO did, and more"? Sky+ doesn't support suggestions, it doesn't support wishlists, season passes don't work as reliably (and until a recent patch used to fail extremely regularly), etc. Sky+ is a fairly good product, but it's much younger than TiVo, and it shows.
What happens when tivo records a show at 4AM, when you are watching something else?
;)
Personally I'm in bet at 4am. Call me old if you like...
Anyhow, TiVo records under two circumstances: (1) You've asked it to (2) It's decided you might like it to, based on the thumbs up and thumbs down statistics you've given it.
When TiVo is not in "live TV" mode, i.e. playing back buffered stuff from the last half hour, it will change channel whenever it feels like it -- because it knows you're not watching live TV. The assumption is that you only ever watch TV via TiVo, and this is what you should do.
When you *are* watching live TV, TiVo will not attempt to change channel in order to record category (2) programs. If a category (1) program is coming up, it will pop up a dialogue, "You asked me to record xxxx, press OK to change channel or Cancel to stay on this channel and not record it after all".
Yes, if you're piping output from your cable box around the house, this might cause problems. Not many people are.
What people are referring to is that if they had hacked their units by installing a larger hard drive, TiVo partitioned some of that space out for reserved space.
Since TiVo doesn't support hacked drives, they don't need to write special code to identify and protect them. Behavior of an upgraded machine was a known risk.
Quite a few people at my work have Tivo/Sky+ and are constantly raving on about all the features they have, the things they can do with them, how it's changed their TV viewing habits, blah de blah... and all I'm left thinking is "I can do all that with my VCR and the weekend copy of the Guardian Guide."
Anyone want to try to convince me i) why I should get one of these gizmos other than sheer techno-fetishism, and ii) why I should get one rather than a DVD recorder?
You must think in Russian.